Kingston Ships SSDNow V300 Series Solid-State Drives

Posted on November 19, 2012 7:30 AM by Robert Tanner

Kingston is no stranger to SSDs, in fact, over the past few years Kingston has literally offered the most diverse repertoire of solid-state drives available. By that we mean Kingston has utilized one or more generations of controllers from Toshiba, Marvell, Intel, JMicron, Samsung, and even SandForce with the high-performance HyperX series of SSDs.

The recent acquisition of SandForce by LSI Technologies hasn’t seemed to dampen Kingston’s enthusiasm for SandForce either, as Kingston has recently announced its latest SSDNow V300 series drives powered by an LSI SandForce controller. Making things interesting. the V300 is already set to use industry-leading 19nm NAND Flash memory, making it the first SSD we know of to drop below the 20nm fabrication process barrier.

Kingston’s SSDNow V300 drives are being marketed as a cost-effective option for consumers looking to migrate into the SSD performance world. At Techgage, we have reviewed quite a lot of budget SSDs from Kingston over the years and have even come away impressed by several Toshiba models. But to see a SandForce controller offered in a budget model SSD is somewhat surprising, and intriguing. To give some perspective, the SF-2200 controller has been utilized in flagship model SSDs for almost two years running now and they still easily offer the performance to do so. Speaking of performance, all the info is in the table!

60GB

120GB

240GB

Max Sequential Reads / Writes (MB/s)

450/450

Max Random Reads / Writes (IOPS)

85,000/60,000

85,000/55,000

85,000/43,000

Interface

SATA 3.0 (6Gbps)

Max Power Consumption

0.640W Idle / 1.423W Read / 2.052W Write

Endurance Rating

32TB

64TB

128TB

Warranty

3 Years

The press release makes further note that this isn’t just another stock controller and firmware package, but that Kingston has elected to utilize a customized SSD solution. This most likely refers to the firmware, as Kingston has kept an active hand in firmware updates with its SandForce powered HyperX SSDs, rather than simply utilizing newer firmware updates as-is.

“LSI worked together with Kingston to deliver a customized high-performing solid-state drive solution for their cost-effective SSDNow V series. Our award-winning SF-2281 Client FSPs provide Kingston’s customers with enterprise-class features and an enhanced everyday computing user experience, especially for first time SSD users.” said Kent Smith, senior director of product marketing at flash components division at LSI.

By now, such important things like TRIM and SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) interface support are of course included, and so is the standard 3-year warranty which is awesome to see. Kingston even lists the expected write endurance figures which are not typically given for cost-conscious model SSDs. The only thing not listed are unfortunately prices, as the press release simply says to check store prices once drives hit the shelves. We can actually understand this decision given that past launch MSRP’s have tended to differ (sometimes radically) from actual street prices, meaning past Kingston SSDs have often hit the street at lower prices than the official MSRP. Kingston will be offering the SSDNow V300 series drives in stand-alone, desktop, and notebook upgrade kits.